I'm really digging the animated history bits. Especially since they've been much better than the usual origin stories / mythology of science. Bits and pieces from outside the typical mythology of science (history from China and the Islamic Renaissance, not just the usual British suspects.) It's got ...

How few people live in Australia and the US (I mean how much area per person there is) never fails to boggle me completely. Australia is significantly more incredible in this regard than the US. The population density of the USA is 34 per square kilometre, in Australia it's 2.8, less than 10% of th...

I'm planning to scribble down my thoughts on the book and the series (and inflict said thoughts on you lot here, of course) soon enough - I preordered the last book, and took a day off work to read it ASAP. But before I do that, just wanted to reply to this: Btw. Did anyone else notice this was the ...

TYL: There's absolutely nothing you can say about my appearance that I do not already know, so.... go right ahead? I personally don't find it odd or creepy. I've always thought you look kinda like Jack from Lost. So I instantly thought that with eyeliner you'd look like Richard. Even though he does...

Or if you're good enough you can make it last years instead of hours? You could find other examples of things being left for ages. What Rand leaves around Callandor, for one. Traps left around waygates, too? There're plenty of examples of compulsion being left on people, but that might be a differen...

One of my local instructors hurt his knee(s) last year. He has kept up training, but there is a whole bunch of stuff he isn't doing until he gets the okay from the doctor. I'd say best to see a knee-doctor-person and ask them what sort of motions / activities / whatnot you should avoid. You might be...

The upshot: the pointwise limit of those shapes is a circle, but the pointwise limit doesn't preserve many features of functions, including arclength. This weirds me out more than the notion of pi being four, to be honest. Sigh. I've spent the last week wishing I'd done more maths at uni. Now I'm r...

Could you point out "A" for me? I just finished reading it, and that must have completely slipped me by. Looking just now for a quote, I found out that it's explicity stated in the Glossary. Huh. Haven't read those since book six. Used to be, I thought, that they didn't have s...

Read a bunch over the summer break. In the middle of a Raymond Chandler four-in-one that's going down like whiskey. I've read The Big Sleep , Farewell, My Lovely , and The Little Sister (which wasn't in the set) thus far. I very rarely pick the twists or connections, but then I rarely think that far...

I don't own a pair of sunglasses. I also don't own sunglasses. The sunnies I wear, my Dad gets them from his work. Safety glasses. Which means I have multiple pairs, and every time I lose a pair I have more at home (lost half a dozen or so last year.) Makes me feel slightly like a cartoon character...

I have it working fine. But it takes me back to the old days of computing, when running something at the highest settings was simply impossible. I understand it's the shaders that really cripple the FPS, but I mostly use it for distant lands - extending out the max view distance by say x3-x5 say - a...

Yes, because all people everywhere have promised to mentally substitute "men and women in a rainbow-colored coalition of togetherness" every time someone uses the word "man." Yes, because English is a language entirely free of ambiguity. There aren't any words with more than one...

I say that as most of the time bitching about Basic Human Decency seems to boil down to "We can't call them Darkies anymore and I'm sad" When I complain about too much PC it tends to be things like "you can't say fireman, it's fireperson now" or "now children, let's sing 'B...

I think the teaser trailer - the one that ends with "It's just a game!" "Not anymore" - was a separate promotional thing. Unless it was right at the start and I missed it because the silly cinema were so slow in opening that morning.

The only thing that pissed me off as such was the under-use of Tron himself. He needed more of a tail to his story arc with more exposition at the end to explain it fully. I was expecting an obvious sequel hook scene at the end of him coming out of the water. But I think it was meant to be a redemp...

Saw it this morning, enjoyed it thoroughly. Everything I was expecting from the trailer. Loved the look of it. (I think "darker and edgier" worked for the art style, even if it made the plot more laughable.) I liked the simplified neon/latex outfits. Especially the robes. The sound was gre...

Alchemy in Fullmetal Alchemist is really fascinating to me. It's explained so well that you just accept it, and then you go back and think about it and realize it doesn't actually make any sense at all but that's okay . I quite liked in the Anime how they implied that in our world Newton's scientif...

Maybe it's just me, but I was always bothered by the use of telekinesis in films and TV shows. People lifting cars and whatnot with their outstretched hand....well, it seems like it would break conservation of momentum, not to mention conservation of energy. There are fictions where this is played ...

Yeah, I'm tending towards awesome too. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but there are plenty of behaviours and actions from, say, fifty years ago, from the great depression, that were just as illegal, but that I can only see as being the right thing to do.

He was arrested in London on a Swedish warrant. Why on earth would he end up in the states? I can understand why his lawyers and his team expect that to happen, but is there any legitimate, non-conspiracy-theory-confirming way his arrest on this charge could end up with him in the USA?